Authors: Barbara Bretton

Someone Like You (34 page)

BOOK: Someone Like You

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And then she would let it go. The years of resentment. The pain. All of it. Only the story mattered, but she and Joely were the ones who would write the ending.

How quiet the house seemed without Annabelle. She wandered into the guest room and stripped the sheets from the bed. She was halfway to the laundry room when she realized the phone had been quiet for hours.

Had she forgotten to plug it back in? She lifted the receiver and heard the familiar dial tone. Maybe the ringer was off. She dialed herself from the cell. Nope. The ringer worked just fine.

There was no reason for frantic calls from reporters now that Mark was out there granting interviews and photo ops. It was just that she thought maybe Michael would call or text her or something. This silence wasn’t his style at all.

She started the laundry then walked into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of orange juice. She had sent him three text messages earlier this morning. At least she thought she had. Electronic communications weren’t infallible.

Nothing wrong with resending again, was there?

She sifted through her sent text messages, clicked on the last one, then pressed Send again. She watched as the message turned into an envelope icon, then spiraled off into the ether.

Less than ten seconds later her cell rang.

“Michael!” She felt like a sixteen-year-old high school girl. “You got my message?”

“You sent a message?”

“I texted you three times.” Four, but who was counting.

“So what’s up?”

She hesitated. Why was it so hard to say the words to him? What was so difficult about saying I love you, I need you, I want you in my life?

“How would you feel about driving up here to meet my parents?” she managed in one long rush of words.

“Sorry, Doyle. I’m busy tonight.” It didn’t take him a nanosecond to beg off.

“Oh,” she said. “Well.”
Pull it together,
she told herself.
Don’t embarrass yourself
. “I didn’t mean tonight. You know . . . whenever.” Clearly it was a very good thing she made her living with wool, not words.

“I’m going out for dinner tonight.”

“You don’t owe me an explanation.” The hell he didn’t.

“Thought I’d get some lobster.”

“In New York? There goes your next royalty check.” Why was he telling her this? She didn’t want to hear any of it.

“Actually I know a place where lobster’s pretty reasonable.”

“Good for you.” She ordered herself not to cry. He was talking shellfish, not the end of civilization.

“Open the front door.”

Her heart bounced off her rib cage. “What did you say?”

“Open your front door before these lobsters make a break for it.”

She peered out the front window, and there he was. Jet-lagged. Disheveled. Struggling up the front walk with a bucket of irritable crustaceans and the biggest bouquet of roses she had ever seen in her life.

The man she loved.

Her baby’s father.

Her future.

“YOU COULD HAVE told me you hated to fly,” Zach said as he prepared the small plane for landing at Portland.

“I don’t hate to fly,” Joely said. But, as it turned out, she did hate flying through the air in a tin can.

“Seat belt fastened?”

“It’s been fastened since we took off.”

“It might be a little choppy,” he warned. “There’s some crosswind.”

“Just get me there in time, Zach. That’s all I’m asking.”

It was all she was asking of Zach. God, however, was being bombarded with a steady barrage of prayer, plea bargains, and promises.

Fifteen minutes later, her legs still trembling from the bumpy landing, she ran from counter to counter, desperate for information but nobody knew anything. The electronic signs were no help. And to make it worse, she had the feeling she was too late.

“I spoke to someone at the United counter,” Zach said, catching up with her near the first security checkpoint. “They fly to Glasgow via London.” He hugged her tight. “I’m sorry, kid. The flight left an hour ago.”

She didn’t cry, but the sense of loss was so overwhelming she could barely stand. “Okay,” she said, stiffening her spine. “Okay.”

“Don’t cry,” Zach warned. “I’ll end up giving you the plane and my company if you cry.”

“I’m not going to cry,” she promised him. She was too numb to do anything but stand there staring up at him.

“So why don’t you fly over there yourself?” Zach said after a moment or ten. “They have another flight tonight. You would be just a few hours behind them.”

“My passport’s back at Cat’s.”

“We’ll go back and get it.”

She shook her head. “It’s a sign. This was a crazy idea. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“You weren’t thinking. You were following your heart.”

“Too little, too late,” she said.

“Maybe not,” Zach said. “Look over there.”

William, with Annabelle at his side, was standing at the United ticket counter with their backs to her.

She wanted to tear across the terminal and fling herself into William’s arms and lay her heart at his feet.

She wanted to hide behind Zach until the feeling went away.

“Go over there,” Zach said, placing his hands against her back and pushing her forward. “That’s why you came here. Do it!”

“I can’t!”

“You can’t
not
do it,” he said. “This is your destiny, Joely. Go for it.”

He was right. She knew he was right. But, oh God, it was hard to face your future head-on when you didn’t know the outcome.

She put one foot in front of the other. She tried to remember to breathe. The distance between them seemed to widen, but she kept moving, closing the gap, praying in a way she had never prayed before, until she was inches away.

“William?”

She sounded terrified, which was no surprise. She was terrified. What happened in the next sixty seconds would determine the rest of her life.

He turned slowly, and she saw shock on his face and then—

Oh God, was that disappointment?

“Joely!” Annabelle flung herself around her legs and hugged her tight. “I knew you’d come with us. I told Daddy you would!”

She bent down and pressed a kiss to the top of the girl’s head, but her eyes never left William’s.

“Don’t go,” she said, heart on her sleeve, her future in his hands. “Please don’t.”

“You came all this way to say that?”

Please, God, make him stop looking at me that way
.

“You can’t—I mean, please don’t . . . I—”

“Don’t say anything.” He placed the palm of his left hand against her lips. She tried to speak, but he shook his head. “I love you, Joely. I wanted to be the first one to say it.”

“I love you, too,” she said, feeling the truth of it fill her heart. “I love you!” She flung the words out into the world for the first time in her life and they filled her heart tenfold.

Their gazes met and held. She didn’t turn away or deflect the moment with a joke. She let him see past her defenses, past the walls she had built up over the years, let him see into her heart.

They drew together, closer and then closer still, until their lips met. The taste and touch of him was familiar yet brand-new.

It was a moment of firsts. Their kiss held all the wonder and promise of the very first time and in that instant their lives changed forever.

“I know you have to take Annabelle home to see the Sinclairs but—”

“I turned in the tickets.”

“You turned them in?”

He nodded as Annabelle leaped around them like an excited young filly. “They started boarding the plane. We were next in line. They asked for our passports, and I was about to hand them over when I knew I couldn’t go. Not before I told you how I feel.”

“What about her grandparents?” Joely asked. “Won’t they be disappointed?”

“This was more important,” he said. “Our future’s more important.”

“Our future,” she repeated. “We’ve never talked about the future before.”

“You’re right,” he said. “We’ve talked around it, over it, through it, but we’ve never actually talked about it.”

“I wasn’t sure we had one.”

He looked at her. “I wasn’t certain you wanted one.”

“With you,” she said, holding his gaze. “That’s the only future I care about. When I got back to Cat’s house and found out you’d left, it was like my whole world had crashed down on me. I couldn’t imagine my life without you.”

“What about Surrey?”

She shook her head. “I’m not taking the position.”

“Your work is important,” he said. “We could pick up sticks if that’s what you want.”

“Loch Craig is home,” she said. “That’s where I want to be.”

“Marry me, Joely.”

“What did you say?”

“Will you marry me?”

She gasped as he dropped to one knee right there in the middle of Terminal A. William, her reserved and dignified Englishman, was kneeling in a wad of chewing gum, looking up at her with his heart beating crazily on the outside of his chest for the world to see. He was wide open and vulnerable, fearless the way only a man in love could be, and her heart soared.

She thought of her parents on that stage in Newport, beautiful and glowing with love. The look in her mother’s eyes when she realized her husband had come back to her. Her father’s tears. The new life growing in Cat’s belly.

She thought of Annabelle and the weekend visit that had turned into a lifetime.

Nothing about love was easy. It didn’t come with guarantees or guidebooks. It didn’t promise happiness. It couldn’t shield you from pain.

It might even break your heart in two from time to time.

And when it did, she and William would hang onto each other with both hands, and then they would start all over again, better and stronger than they were before.

“Joely?” He looked so painfully unsure of himself. “There’s a crowd gathering around us, and I’m here on one knee—”

“Yes,” she said, then, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” as the crowd around them burst into applause while Annabelle and Zach did an impromptu jig.

There was no candlelight or champagne, no long-stemmed roses or candlelight. They didn’t need the trappings of romance to prove their love. Everything they could ever want was right there within reach.

“Does this mean we’ll be a family just like Louis?” Annabelle asked as they followed Zach out to his plane for the trip back to Idle Point. “With the same names and everything?”

“That’s exactly what it means.” William winked at Joely over Annabelle’s head. “We might even be able to produce a baby brother or sister for you.”

“I don’t want one anymore,” Annabelle said. “I want an alpaca.”

“The girl knows fiber,” Zach said. “I’d listen to her.”

“Don’t worry,” Joely whispered to William. “I prefer a baby to an alpaca any day.”

Suddenly Annabelle stopped short and looked up at Joely, her little face aglow with happiness. “Can I call you Mummy now?”

Joely gripped William’s hand so hard she almost broke his fingers. “I would be very, very happy if you started calling me Mummy right this very minute.”

“Brilliant!” Annabelle declared.

Three months later, on the hill behind their house in Loch Craig, with the people they loved most in the world gathered around them, William Bishop and Joely Doyle (and Annabelle) made it official.

They became a family.

Epilogue

One year later

ON THE MORNING of the summer solstice Joely Doyle Bishop woke up to the sound of children laughing outside her window. If there was a better way to wake up, God hadn’t created it yet.

She didn’t move quickly these days. Her center of gravity seemed to shift on an almost hourly basis. The simple act of climbing from bed in the morning required both cunning and a helping hand.

“William!” she called out. “I feel like a beached whale!”

There was nothing pretty about the sight of a woman in her ninth month struggling to sit up in bed but she had long since said good-bye to things like vanity and dignity.

“I told Annabelle and Louis to play quietly,” William said from the doorway. “I’ll send them over to Sara’s for the morning.”

Joely hid a yawn behind her hand then smiled up at her husband. “Don’t,” she said. “I love the sound.”

“Cat phoned.” William placed a glass of orange juice on the nightstand then helped her sit up. “She dreamed today would be the day.”

“Her mouth to God’s ear,” Joely said, rubbing her belly absently. “I’m ready when our son is.”

“First babies are usually late,” William reminded her. “You may go another week.”

“Sadist,” she muttered with a laugh. “I’ll need my own postal code if I get any bigger.”

“You’re beautiful.”

“You’re blind without your glasses,” she said, ruffling his hair. “So what else did Cat say?”

“The usual. I promised you’d phone her at the first contraction so she can jump on a plane.”

“Michael and Katie might have something to say about that.”

William sat on the edge of the bed and she leaned into his warmth. “They’re coming, too,” he said. “Cat says we started a new Doyle family tradition when we flew back for Katie’s birth.”

Katie was a five-month-old dictator who had both Cat and Michael wrapped around her tiny finger. Not to mention her aunt, uncle, and cousin in Scotland. It had been a magical, wondrous time and Annabelle was purely delighted to have a baby cousin.

“I wouldn’t have missed that for the world,” Joely said as a funny little twinge pinched her mid-section. “Cat was—” She stopped as the twinge escalated into something deeper, more intense.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” She forced a smile. “Just a little twinge.”

BOOK: Someone Like You

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